Data Science

Person wearing a face mask walking past a large American flag.

Political polarization distilled using data science

Penn juniors Emma Arsekin and Janelle Schneider broke down partisanship politics by analyzing metadata as PURM research assistants for political science Professor Daniel Hopkins.

Penn Medicine helps power international COVID-19 data consortium

An international consortium involving Penn researchers pools electronic health record data from around the world to discover clinical insights about COVID-19.

Doctor in protective gear looks at a brain scan projected on transparent screen

New machine learning method allows hospitals to share patient data privately

An emerging technique called federated learning is a solution for health systems and hospitals that are often resistant to sharing patient data, due to legal, privacy, and cultural challenges.

Two soldiers on a field carry a stretcher with a wounded soldier.

U.S. military has improved mortality since World War II, with some alarming exceptions

Although wound survivability has increased over the last 80 years, the U.S. military’s medical corps suffered some periods of backsliding during conflicts.

Microscopic coronavirus images superimposed over digital global map

Coronavirus models aren’t crystal balls. So what are they good for?

Epidemiologists and data scientists have been gathering data, making calculations, and creating mathematical models to answer critical questions about COVID-19, but math cannot account for the unpredictability of human behavior.

A young child sits in a hallway burying their head in their arms on a rather dirty carpet

Childhood exposure to trauma costs society $458 billion annually

Bureaucratic hurdles block access to treatment services, so they tend to go unused. This leads to adverse outcomes that put stress on public systems like social services and law enforcement.

A person sitting at a desk covered in papers, with a computer screen in the background. Four people are blurry, in the foreground. They are all engaged in conversation.

What factors predict success?

New research from Angela Duckworth and colleagues finds that characteristics beyond intelligence influence long-term achievement.

rendering of the human head from three angles with visuals of networks reaching out from the center of the brain

Removing human bias from predictive modeling

Predictive modeling is supposed to be neutral, a way to help remove personal prejudices from decision-making. But the algorithms are packed with the same biases that are built into the real-world data used to create them.

A scan of a human body analyzed by AI tools.

Can the additive tree expand machine learning in medicine?

By combining elements of two widely used prediction models, the “additive tree” is a highly predictive model that is also easy to interpret.

A robot sits between two people at a desk, all with open laptops, the humans eye the robot suspiciously.

Can artificial intelligence help answer HR’s toughest questions?

Wharton's Peter Cappelli and Prasanna Tambe discuss the challenges companies face when they outsource their Human Resources departments to AI, allowing algorithms to remedy imperfect human decision-making for hiring, firing, scheduling, and promoting.

Filters